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Fools parade

Suppose a friend told you that he was $18 trillion in debt. And suppose that every time you asked him who he owed this money to, he gave you a different answer.

If that was the case, then you would rightly say, “He claims to have a debt crisis, but he doesn’t know who he owes money to. He is either an idiot or a liar.”

However, if your friend called himself an economist, then you might believe his lies.

For example, the U.S. government is supposedly $18 trillion “in debt.” If you ask who this $18 trillion is supposedly owed to, you get a different answer each time. Here are some examples…

That’s enough. If no one can agree on who the “national debt” is owed to, then how can the U.S. government have a “debt crisis”?

Money isn’t physical. It has no substance. Money exists only in human minds, like points on a scoreboard. The lights on the scoreboard above are not points. They are lights. But the human mind interprets them as points. The lights represent points, which exist only in the human mind. Neither points nor dollars have substance, and therefore can never “run out” or be “depleted.”

The item below is not money. It is a piece of paper. But the human mind interprets the numbers printed on the paper as money. True money exists only in the human mind, and is logged in the digital accounts of banks, although not all bank money consists of bank loans.

A currency note represents money, just as the lights on a scoreboard represent points. A currency note can be used to buy things, because we mentally agree that the note represents money-points.

For currency notes, we could use wood, or stones, or anything else that we agree on. (U.S. currency notes are made out of flax and cotton.)

BELOW: Some Native American tribes in North America used their own form of money called wampum. The word meant “white” in the Algonquin language, because one type of wampum consisted of disc-shaped beads made from clam shells, perforated through the center, and threaded on a string. Another type of wampum consisted of small cylinder-shaped beads, again threaded on a string. The first European colonists in New England used native wampum as money, and they began to counterfeit it for use in trading with the natives. Their counterfeit scam worked for a while, because the natives did not think that anyone would be so evil as to counterfeit “wampum.” (The essence of European “superiority” was a sociopathic tendency to do evil.) Eventually the European counterfeiting caused the first inflation in the Americas.

Below are Massachusetts shillings, the first government-authorized coins in America. Made out of a silver alloy, they were authorized by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1652. Other coins (the Massachusetts Willow, Oak, and Pine Tree shillings) were issued between 1652 and 1682. Many had teeth marks, or dents, or bended edges, put there by superstitious colonists who were trying to keep witches away. Often when food became scarce, and life became hard, the colonists went insane, and formed into mobs that conducted witch hunts. This practice has continued throughout human history. In today’s tough times, people go on witch hunts for “terrorists.”

Below is the first government-authorized paper money in America. In 1690 the Province of Massachusetts Bay began issuing these “bills of credit.” This was done for a specific purpose (to finance a military expedition), but like modern paper money, they circulated freely.

BELOW: The English word “dollar” comes from the valley and town of Jáchymov in the Czech Republic, which was called by the German name of Joachimsthal until 1898. In the early 1500s silver mines started operating here. One family, the Counts von Schlick, became very rich in terms of property, and they started minting coins they called Joachimsthalers, which were later called shortened to “thalers.” Coinage systems spread across Europe. In Spain, coins (“thalers”) were called “dollars.”

In various parts of the New World (e.g. Mexico and Ecuador) the Spanish minted silver coins (“dollars”) which became commonly used in the American colonies. In fact, Spanish coins continued to be used throughout the USA for much of the 1800s.

The coins were worth eight reales in the Spanish monetary system, and they were often cut into eight pieces to make change. The bits were known as “pieces of eight.” For English-speaking peoples a “bit” was one eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents. “Two bits” meant 25 cents.

BELOW: The first coin issued by the authority of the United States was the Fugio cent. Issued in 1787, it is a copper coin bearing 13 circles linked together. It also has a small circle with the words “United States” around it. The reverse side has a sundial and the word “Fugio,” which means “time flies.”

The point of all this is that money has no intrinsic value. Money is whatever we agree that it is. What gives value to money is not gold or any other substance, but human agreement. A dollar is a mental unit of account, which we symbolize as numbers. Coins and notes can represent money, but actual money has no physical existence, and therefore has no limits. It is in-finite.

Therefore when someone says there is “no money” to help the people of Flint Michigan, he is either lying, or else he is speaking from habit and mental conditioning, in which case he is a slave of those who control the money scoreboard.

Remember that if someone says, “Flint needs eighty million dollars,” the U.S. government creates that much money out of thin air for its wars every two minutes, round the clock, 365 days per year. Recently Obama spent $500 million to train some “moderate” terrorists in Syria. (For Obama the terrorists were far more important than the people of Flint Michigan.)

By the way, note how right-wingers want government “out of the way” (of their greed and their evil). They want less government spending (on programs that help average people). But when right-wingers get into trouble, they are always the first to beg for federal bailouts. An example is Michigan governor Rick Snyder who, in response to the disaster in Flint, begged Obama for money, and who has a heartfelt message for America…

BELOW: A postcard sent by Rick Snyder to his mother.

I notice that during the eighteen months that the people of Flint were being poisoned, and authorities were dismissing people’s complaints as “baseless” and “conspiracy theories,” Rick Snyder’s administration quietly provided bottled-water coolers for the offices of his state officials in Flint. While the Snyder regime told Flint residents to shut up about the water, the regime was protecting its own people from the water.

China is walled in. If its reforms are implemented too quickly, then China risks a sharp slowdown. If the reforms are implemented too slowly or not at all, then China risks an unsustainable increase in its debt-to-GDP ratio, which could push the country past the tipping point into economic and, in all likelihood, political instability.

The report bullshit, since it makes no distinction between China’s domestic “national debt” (denominated in yuan) and China’s “foreign debt” (denominated in foreign currency). The domestic “national debt” is trivial, since the Chinese government can create as many yuan as it wants.

Goldman Sachs’ chief, Lloyd Blankfein, took home US$23 million last year for overseeing such bullshit.

Whoever said, “Crime doesn’t pay” has never worked on Wall Street, or in a bank, or in the federal government.

2 thoughts on “Fools parade”

How can people be so blind? Doesn’t it occur to people that real wealth is determined by the amount of resources available. I could understand people saying we have run out of water, wood etc. but money? How can we run out of electronic numbers on a screen lol